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Fiction > Literary
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by Brander MatthewsNOTE
IN one of those romances in which Hawthorne caught the color and interpreted the atmosphere of his native New England, he declared that “destiny, it may be, the most skillful of stage managers, seldom chooses to arrange its scenes and carry forward its drama without securing the presence of at least one calm observer.” It is the character of this calm observer that the writer has imagined himself to be assuming in the dozen little sketches and stories garnered here into a volume. They are snapshots or flashlights of one or another of the shifting aspects of this huge and sprawling metropolis of ours.
In purpose and in method these episodes and these incidents of the urban panorama are closely akin to the experiments in story-telling which were gathered a few years ago into the pair of volumes entitled Vignettes of Manhattan and Outlines in Local Color. The earliest of these stories in this third volume—replevined here from another collection long out of print—was written more than a quarter of a century ago; and the latest of them first saw the light only within the past few months. To each of the dozen sketches the date of composition has been appended as evidence that it was outlined in accord with the actual fact at the time it came into being, even if the metropolitan kaleidoscope has revolved so rapidly that more than one of these studies from life now records what is already ancient history. The bob-tailed car, for example, is already a thing of the past; the hansom is fast following it into desuetude; and no longer is it the fashion for family parties to bicycle through Central Park in the afternoon.
Slight as these fleeting impressions may seem, this much at least may be claimed for them—that they are the result of an honest effort to catch and to fix a vision of this mighty city in which the writer has dwelt now for more than half a century.
B. M.
February 21, 1912.
IN one of those romances in which Hawthorne caught the color and interpreted the atmosphere of his native New England, he declared that “destiny, it may be, the most skillful of stage managers, seldom chooses to arrange its scenes and carry forward its drama without securing the presence of at least one calm observer.” It is the character of this calm observer that the writer has imagined himself to be assuming in the dozen little sketches and stories garnered here into a volume. They are snapshots or flashlights of one or another of the shifting aspects of this huge and sprawling metropolis of ours.
In purpose and in method these episodes and these incidents of the urban panorama are closely akin to the experiments in story-telling which were gathered a few years ago into the pair of volumes entitled Vignettes of Manhattan and Outlines in Local Color. The earliest of these stories in this third volume—replevined here from another collection long out of print—was written more than a quarter of a century ago; and the latest of them first saw the light only within the past few months. To each of the dozen sketches the date of composition has been appended as evidence that it was outlined in accord with the actual fact at the time it came into being, even if the metropolitan kaleidoscope has revolved so rapidly that more than one of these studies from life now records what is already ancient history. The bob-tailed car, for example, is already a thing of the past; the hansom is fast following it into desuetude; and no longer is it the fashion for family parties to bicycle through Central Park in the afternoon.
Slight as these fleeting impressions may seem, this much at least may be claimed for them—that they are the result of an honest effort to catch and to fix a vision of this mighty city in which the writer has dwelt now for more than half a century.
B. M.
February 21, 1912.
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